News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on A routine gem update ended up creating $73k worth of subscriptions. Parent comment

Re:A routine gem update ended up creating $73k worth of subs... by BucketsMcG on Saturday January 08, 2022 @06:34AM (#29850700)
I'm a native English speaker with a degree in linguistics, but I didn't appreciate how hard "some/any" are for native speakers until a Polish colleague asked me to explain it, and I pretty much failed. It's something you learn how to do intuitively, but when you try to formulate a consistent set of rules explaining why you choose one over the other, it turns out to be pretty difficult.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:A routine gem update ended up creating $73k worth of subs... by SOLAR_FIELDS on Saturday January 08, 2022 @03:57PM (#29856158)
A decent amount of English is full of inconsistencies like this. Every language has its warts, of course, but like you I never really realized how difficult English is as a language until asked to explain certain behaviors to non-native speakers.
[ Parent | on HN ]